


The Patron Demon of Everybody's Embarrassing Youth

by AstroGirl



Category: Good Omens (TV)
Genre: Crowley's Demonic Career, Gen, kids these days
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-17
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-15 17:35:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 870
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28817181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: Young people have always been interesting to tempt.
Comments: 8
Kudos: 30
Collections: Gen Prompt Bingo Round 19





	The Patron Demon of Everybody's Embarrassing Youth

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "vantablack." No goths, metalheads, cynical loners, D&D nerds, or concerned adults were harmed in the making of this ficlet, although possibly I owe apologies to some of them. Also, I swore I would never do footnotes again because they're such a pain in the ass, and yet, here we are.

Young people have always been interesting to tempt. Interesting, and easy. All those complicated, conflicting desires, all those impulses unchecked by adult experience and judgment. It's been the same all through human history, really. Every kid so desperate to rebel against their parents, or to live up to their expectations, or both at once. Every young soul so worried about finding their place, about standing out, about fitting in. 

It's always been fun, playing on all of that, but it's got so much easier since the humans started actually thinking of adolescence as its own, separate stage of life, and especially since they've starting throwing around concepts like "youth culture." Youth culture! There are more than one of those, of course, and some of them are wonderful playgrounds for an enterprising demon with a sense of humor. Young humans are so suggestible that it never takes more than a nudge here and there to start a whole new trend. It's entertaining, to see how ridiculous you can get with it all.

Entertaining, and extremely useful. Few things Crowley's come up with in his existence have padded his reports out more effectively with less work than being able to attach lots of pictures of young goths decked out in occult symbols whose history they barely understand, or young metal fans making demon horns with their hands while banging their heads to to songs whose only intelligible lyrics are the occasional invocation of Satan or mention of blood, or the young loners sitting at their suburban dinner tables wearing shirts with cynical phrases on them and lecturing their bored or shocked family members about whatever half-understood things they've read about nihilism that week.

Throw in four or five pages of that, with an enthusiastic note that says "Future souls for our Satanic Lord!," maybe with an attached article or two by Concerned Adults about backward-masked lyrics[1], or that nerdy fantasy game with the dice[2], or Tide Pod eating[3], or whatever they're currently on about, and you're as good as done for the decade. Hell eats that stuff up with a spoon. Never mind that most of the souls in question are actually perfectly good kids, by Hell's standards, who will probably grow up to do all the usual, boring, non-Satanic things every other human does (possibly including writing the occasional Concerned Adult piece about their kids' generation), or that the worst thing that will probably happen to them as a result of any of it is a serious flood of embarrassment when they look back at old photographs.

Yeah, it all works out splendidly, from Crowley's point of view. A fun, low-effort challenge with a nice pay-off, one that stirs up a lot of social chaos[4] without doing any real social harm[5]. And he always feels that nice little glow of mischievous satisfaction, every time he passes some kid wearing a shirt that says something like, "I'm Only Wearing Black Until They Make Something Darker." He's inspired a _lot_ of terrible t-shirts in his time, but he's especially fond of that one. Something about the over-dramatic absurdity of it appeals to him.

Which just makes him all the more amused when he's noodling around online one day[6] and discovers, to his astonishment, that the humans have in fact actually made something darker than black. Or, at least, some material that comes impressively close to swallowing as much light as the black holes he used to make, back in the day[7].

Humans! They somehow always manage to take things even further than he expected. Crazy, ridiculous, wonderfully inventive kids. This is why he never, ever gets tired of them.

He wonders, idly, whether it's possible to make a shirt from this Vantablack stuff. 

He is quite certain that, on him, it would actually look cool.

\---

1 Crowley is especially proud of that one. Not because he inspired anyone to insert backward-masked Satan worship into their music, but because he did such a good job encouraging people to hear it when it wasn't actually there. Even if the humans did originally come up with that themselves. [return to text]

2 Crowley will never, ever, ever admit it, but somewhere deep in his heart, he always thought this one looked kind of fun. The Middle Ages, he is certain, would have been a _lot_ more entertaining if they'd featured more wizards and dragons, and less dirt and starvation .[return to text]

3 Crowley has no idea how this might possibly be related to Satanism, but there was so much uproar about it, he figures it must be relevant _somehow_. [return to text]

4 Which is useful when you're spending eternity on Earth and are prone to boredom if things get too stagnant. [return to text]

5 Which is useful when you're spending eternity on Earth and have to live with the consequences of whatever you do to it. [return to text]

6 Crowley didn't invent pointless, unfocused clicking around on the internet, but he is more than happy to take credit for it. Except on the days when it eats too much into his drinking-and-mischief time. [return to text]

7 Technically, back before days existed. [return to text]


End file.
